


You think you’re a genius (You drive me up the wall)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: (to steve and danny's relationship), Banter, Cake, Fluff, Getting Together, Humor, Innuendo, Literature, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Multiple, POV Outsider, Team as Family, almonds, steve and danny are everyone's favorite soap opera, the return of professor jeffries (and his glasses), video games - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 08:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21316837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: Danny is already shaking his head something fierce. “You don’t want a life partner who’s sweet all the time. You want someone you can fight with, someone you can talk to. You know, spar a little, mentally.”“Oh yes,” Kono says, innocently butting in again, “I can see how that would be very important to you in an epic romance, Danny.”Or: Five times someone in Five-0 watches Steve and Danny be smart, but not really, and one time they’re dumb, but not really.
Relationships: Five-0 Team & Danny "Danno" Williams, Five-0 Team & Steve McGarrett, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 33
Kudos: 481





	You think you’re a genius (You drive me up the wall)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [msbeeinmybonnet (beeinmybonnet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeinmybonnet/gifts).

> SOOO. This fic might be a valid reason why my birthday fic writing license should be revoked. I’m going to do my numbering thing because I have Stuff To Say:
> 
> 1) This is an impressively (shamefully) seven month late birthday gift for msbeeinmybonnet, who is wonderful and smart and very kind, and asked for brainy boys because she felt that’s something fandom needs more of, so evidently she’s selfless, too. 
> 
> 2a) If there’s anything about this concept you liked, thank msbeeinmybonnet! Though if there’s anything about this you don’t like, blame me, because I took her prompt and then interpreted it very loosely (for example, I think I probably didn’t portray the guys as smart so much as nerdy dumbasses who definitely own a brain but you wouldn’t always guess it, and I’m not sure that nebulous early season setting you asked for made it either, because Eric showed up and started partying and refused to leave – just know that I valiantly tried, even if I mostly failed).
> 
> 2b) Also, you said “our boys using their brains as well as their brawn” which is an obvious and WONDERFUL opening for a thrilling case fic, but me being me, I wrote you heaps of plotless fluff and silliness and banter instead. I’m alternately sorry and unapologetic about that, too.
> 
> 3a) This was NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS LONG. Things often get out of hand when I try to write them, but there’s something about birthday fics that like, quadruples that problem. (Literally, in this case. This is now not only my longest posted h50 fic, but also the longest story I wrote and finished in the past two years, and the longest fanfic in… almost exactly four years, probably? Oh god.)
> 
> 3b) Very much related to 3a, this was also NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THIS LATE. I hope that the fact that I accidentally kind of wrote you six fics in a trenchcoat pretending to be a coherent story makes up for that, as well as the fact that the process may have taken way (way!) too long, but it was a labor of love every step of the way.
> 
> 4) The title was taken from _That don’t impress me much_ by Shania Twain, because it just works _so well_ for these numbnuts and I’ve wanted to use it for ages and this gave me a prime opportunity, so yay.
> 
> 5) HAPPY SEVEN-TWELFTH (minus a bit) OF A BIRTHDAY, DEAR FRIEND. 🎂🌈🎉💖💖💖

### 1\. Chin

It’s all the Governor’s fault. If Five-0 had a voice in what kind of promotional material they want their name on, this never would have happened.

That’s what Chin likes to think, anyway. He has to admit there’s a certain thrill to the idea of it – he likes shooting things as much as the next guy, if a little less than Steve – but the reality, as they’re seeing it now, is rapidly turning out to be somewhat depressing. It starts out with simple things, just after the loading screen makes room for the first rough-hewn view of a generic city block, dressed up with a car here and there and two movable player characters. 

Steve and Danny, in _Five-0: The Game_, look somewhat more angular than they do sitting on Chin’s couch holding Chin’s PS3 controllers in real life. Chin has made his peace with the fact that he gave up dibs on his own console by losing at rock-paper-grenade to Steve, but he does now feel a burning curiosity to know if the programmers did his cheekbones justice. It’s only natural.

Danny has different concerns, such as, “How are we suddenly the same height?” He sounds deeply offended.

Steve takes his eyes off the TV screen just long enough to grin at Danny. “Hey, congratulations, buddy. Finally you can see the world the way grown-ups do.”

It’s all fun and games as they’re learning the controls needed to move their avatars – walking, running, ducking. It’s still a game, obviously, when the tutorial is giving them the first instructions on how to select a weapon and shoot, but the fun part of it is becoming more and more rooted in mocking rather than any kind of genuine pride that that’s _them_ on screen. As impressive as all of this is – and it is; Chin is genuinely fascinated and humbled – it’s also riddled with some… issues.

“No!” Steve yells. “Never hug cover!” He isn’t even done reprimanding the tiny, blurry digital version of himself shown in the instruction reel for the next leg of the game, when he winces in real life, rearing back a bit on Chin’s couch. “Please, don’t crouch down to reload in an open street, oh Jesus. Do they realize bullets travel parallel to the concrete if the angle of impact happens to be shallow enough? Do they _want_ us to get shot in the groin?”

“Ow,” Chin contributes, because while he doubts the game is detailed or crude enough to allow for genital injuries, it’s not an enjoyable thought either way.

Danny doesn’t flinch, but he’s frowning like he’s trying to compete with a pug for most wrinkled face. “I like having my penis attached right where it is, thank you very much.” 

Steve abandons his gaping at the TV to dart a glance down at Danny’s lap. His eyes are back up in a flash, but there’s nothing wrong with Danny’s peripheral vision.

“Yes,” he says, snidely, “it’s right around there somewhere. Good guess, Sherlock.”

Steve hums. “I have a feeling for these things, Watson.”

Chin opens his mouth and then closes it. Better not to.

“I’m not sure if I’m more floored by your impeccable instincts or the fact that you had one whole feeling.”

“Hey, to be clear, I did not have a feeling about your-” 

Chin doesn’t consider himself a man who is easily cowed, but he’s right on the edge of sticking his fingers in his ears and loudly humming any song he can remember from his trumpeting days when Steve mercifully cuts himself off, distracted by the next discovery of terrible in-game physics. 

“This is like shooting pool.” He seems genuinely troubled. “That’s not how bullets work. They don’t just bounce off the wall at the same clean angle they come in – this doesn’t account for deformation of the projectile at all.”

Danny yanks one hand from his own controller to slap in the direction of Steve’s. “Hey, watch it! You’re not shooting pool, you’re shooting _me_.”

Kono comes bouncing in from the kitchen, holding her own beer and a giant bowl of fried chicken that’s going to make Malia sigh at Chin because their house will smell like deep-fry for days. It’ll be worth it. Kono’s culinary abilities are limited, but she has a magic touch when it comes to throwing things in hot oil. 

Besides, with Steve and Danny distracted by the game, there’ll be more for Chin.

“Did they die yet?” Kono asks, hopefully, as she deposits the chicken on the coffee table and takes a seat on the arm of the lazy chair Chin has laid claim to. There’s still room on the couch next to Danny, but she’s probably making a smart play by not getting too close to that.

“Not yet,” Chin says. Rooting for the death of his teammates is a new one for him, but he thinks he’s justified this once. “But it doesn’t look like it’s going to take long.”

Steve proves this wonderfully by crying out, at that exact moment, “Danny, cover me!”

On the screen, Steve’s character is walking leisurely towards a generic bad guy in a suit with a huge gun. The real Steve is smashing buttons furiously, but he might have forgotten how to run.

“No!” Danny yells back, equally as riled up, but allowing his character some time to show off its idle animation by not telling it to move from its spot just around the corner. “I refuse! Steven, you keep running into walls. That’s a suicide mission, you total asshat.”

Digital Steve keeps strolling up to the guy with the gun in a strange zigzag pattern. The only reason Steve hasn’t gotten shot yet is probably that the bad guy is determinedly — stupidly — looking the other way. “You wish.”

“I wish you were an asshat? What does that _mean_?”

“I don’t know,” Steve admits. “Just seemed appropriate.”

“Could be seen as a generally fitting comeback,” Chin offers.

Steve perks up and nods in Chin’s direction while Danny glares hard at the TV.

“Why are you taking sides? No, let me rephrase that: why are you taking the _wrong_ side?”

On the screen, angular Steve takes aim and shoots suit guy with an elegant bull’s eye shot to the heart in a single attempt. Suit guy dies with a dramatic “awgh” sound, falling to his knees and promptly vanishing. “Ha!” real Steve says, while Danny mumbles, “Of course you’d remember how to hit _those_ buttons.”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” Chin says, for posterity’s sake. He’s not under any illusions that Steve and Danny are still paying real attention to him. He gets up briefly, patting Kono’s knee, and snags a piece of chicken. Steve and Danny’s empty Longboards are both sitting abandoned on the table. “More beer, guys?”

Steve shakes his head almost imperceptibly, not taking his eyes off the TV for one second. “No, thanks.”

“Steven,” Danny says, in that tone that’s like a loading screen for Steve and Danny bickering, “are you trying to stay sober for a video game?”

“Reaction speed is way better sober. It’s all about speed.” That’s a little ironic, coming from the guy who made his first kill at a snail’s pace, but Chin doesn’t voice that thought. Instead he eats fried chicken with as much dignity as he can muster, because he’d like to keep the shreds of their fragile peace.

Kono doesn’t seem to have gotten that memo. “And here I thought it was size that mattered,” she cuts in, smiling angelically.

Danny sits up a little straighter at that. “Because I’m such a gracious friend, I’ll forgive you for what sounds awfully like a short joke.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” Kono lies.

“I think it was a penis joke, actually,” Chin says, because hey, when in Rome. In this case it’s more like _when surrounded by immature people you work with_ or _when your fingers are greasy with college dorm food anyway_, but the same principle applies.

Steve is grinning. He elbows Danny in the side, who elbows him right back. “Feeling small, Danno?”

Danny slouches and lets his legs fall open an inch more, cocky in every sense of the word even while his eyes are still on the TV. “Nah, babe. I have no reason to.”

Steve stops jostling Danny with his arm to pull a very conflicted face. It’s like he’s trying to aim for disturbed, but all his marksmanship qualifications are failing him temporarily. “TMI, Danny.”

“Oh,” Danny proclaims, laughing, “you wuss. Don’t pretend like you weren’t trying to take a peek just a minute ago.”

Steve puffs out his chest and Chin can see very clearly where this is going. Usually, it’s easiest for all involved to let Steve and Danny’s fights play out to their natural conclusion, but he’s not taking any chances on Steve asking Danny to either give a detailed description, or drop his pants so Steve can prove his manly courage, or whatever the actual point may be in their minds by now. They can do all of that with Chin’s blessing somewhere that’s not the middle of his living room.

The game, terrible as it is, at least provides an obvious target to draw people’s attention to. Chin points at the screen, where Steve’s bullets ping around the empty street. If ammo is limited, Steve is going to be in trouble soon. “Is that car bulletproof?”

“Yes,” Steve says. He sounds pained. 

“Oh God,” Danny adds. Distraction accomplished. “What regular street car is bulletproof from roof to wheels?”

“There’s a bad guy behind it,” Kono notes. “Maybe that’s why?”

Steve actually gasps. His spray of bullets goes from scattered, lazy shots for his own amusement that keep forcing Danny to take a few steps to avoid getting hit, to a concentrated hail of fire directed at the car in question. Suddenly, he’s the one who has to make his character dance to the side to keep his health bar from diving into the red. “Shit!” 

Danny stops muttering dark curses to goggle at this new development. “Did those bullets just do what I think they did?”

“If you think they impacted a small hatchback’s window and magically turned 180 degrees to come flying back at me like a bouncy ball, then yes.” Steve’s face is grim. He stares hard at the screen for a second and then makes his character crouch — he seems to have figured out the controls — and starts shooting with his endless, instantly reloaded supply of bullets again, aiming at the concrete just in front of the car.

Danny almost throws his controller at the TV screen. He looks about two seconds from using it for attempted manslaughter — attempted only because Chin is reasonably sure he and Kono could stop Danny if it really came to that. “Open your eyes, Steven! That car is fused to the floor, dammit. You can’t shoot under it!”

Steve doesn’t take his finger off the trigger. “I _should_! I should be able to!”

“Yeah, you should,” Kono says. “They actually teach that at the police academy.”

“Right!” 

A timer counting down from six seconds appears, hovering in the air above the car while an oily black circle spreads under it.

“What’s that?” Steve asks. He finally lets up on his endeavor to perforate the bulletproof car one count before there’s a bang, the screen flashes yellow and red and white for a moment, and a pop-up springs up, proclaiming _GAME OVER_ in a blocky font.

“The car blew up,” Danny says, stunned. “Oh my God, you made a car explode and it killed us. I have nightmares about this.”

Steve throws his controller down, but he does it on the couch seat, so it bounces harmlessly and comes to a safe rest. “This is stupid. It was leaking fuel! Did you see that? So why did it suddenly stop being magically bulletproof? Better yet, how the hell is it going to blow up if there’s a leak in the tank and there’s no way for pressure to build?”

Danny slams his controller next to Steve’s. “Well, maybe somebody put a bomb in the car.” 

“What, in every car along this entire street? What kind of bad guys are these?”

“Hey. Hey! Who here made it to triple banana, huh? Who’s the video game expert? Don’t even talk to me, you lowly double pretzel.” Danny’s finger pokes choppily in Steve’s direction. Steve looks at it like he wants to bite it.

“You can’t compare this to Pac-Man. This not the same thing.”

“I’m not old enough for this,” Kono says.

“Besides,” Steve continues, “I was winning, so you’re just jealous of my-”

“I have an idea,” Chin offers. He talks right over Steve without raising his voice. This is not a situation worthy of a yell, but he’s not going to get a word in edgewise if he waits for a chance to speak. “Why don’t both of you boys go over there, by that corner, and you can take some time to discuss where you went wrong.”

“Oh,” Danny says, “I know where it all went wrong. It was a September day in Steve’s garage.”

Steve gets up jerkily and snatches both his and Danny’s empty bottle from the table. “I’m getting another beer.”

As Steve turns on his heel, Danny jumps up too. “Hey! Suddenly you can drink again?”

Chin waits patiently until they’ve disappeared into the kitchen and then gets up too and closes the door behind them, muffling their ongoing spirited conversation. In the blessed absence of yelling teammates, Kono raises an eyebrow at him. “Did you just put them in a time out?”

Chin inclines his head at her and hides his maniacal laughter on the inside. “They don’t know that.”

“Nice one, cuz.” Kono offers up her fist, fully grinning now, so he bumps it.

He gathers up the controllers Steve and Danny left behind and hands one to Kono. Time for a thorough inspection of his own cheekbones.

*

### 2\. Kono

See, there’s a history here. The first year that Danny approached Chin and her to collect money for a birthday cake for Steve, Kono was pretty impressed by what he managed to come up with. When the initial plan went awry because Steve inadvertently ruined the surprise, Danny even managed to wrangle a replacement that was just as good on short notice. 

Looking back, maybe that’s when she’d let herself be lulled into a false sense of security, birthday-cake-wise.

She tilts her head and frowns down at the thing perched on the edge of the tech table from a new angle, but it’s still just a plain white brick with a whole bunch of numbers painted on top. Not even creatively – they’re boring, plain black, in a readable order and perfectly spaced, like something off a computer screen. 

“What do you think?” Danny asks. He sounds excited, but Kono can’t see why. It’s just not a grenade. It’s not even a gun.

She resists the urge to poke at it. They already did the whole salted cake prank, but maybe it’s supposed to _do_ something interesting, even though it’s way too small to be hiding a stripper. “You know that when you forget to order your best friend a cake, the solution isn’t to steal one from some lonely mathematicians’ seventieth birthday party, right?”

Danny crosses his arms and leans a hip against the table. He doesn’t seem too bothered by her lack of immediate exuberance. “It’s a bit of an obscure joke, I’ll grant you, but Steve’s going to like it.”

Kono rereads the numbers, nicely paired off in groups of four in three rows: _1.772 4538 5091_. She can’t deny that she’s a little bummed her money went into this. When Danny first told her the cake this year was going to involve a play on words, she’d expected something like a cute edible seal, possibly balancing a beach ball on its nose. 

“So,” she says, drawing out the word to make it clear that she’s fishing. “What is it? Chin’s length in meters to the third decimal and a date according to a non-Gregorian calendar?” She squints at the cake. “Coordinates?”

Danny gives a little shake of his head. “That’s so off-base it just landed on the moon, my young friend. Want me to tell you, or do you want to keep taking terrible guesses?”

“Wow, you really know how to talk to the ladies,” Kono shoots back. Her competitive side flares up and she almost insists on trying to figure it out, but she’s already given it her best and he’s grinning at her now. She finds she wants to be let in on the joke more than she wants to figure it out on her own, and he’s ohana, so that’s okay. “Hit me. What’s so great about this?”

He prods one corner of the cake box like he’s trying to straighten it’s position, but she strongly suspects him of needing a distraction in order to contain an unmanly giggle. “It’s all one number, it just didn’t fit in one line,” he reveals. “It’s the square root of pi.”

“You’re kidding me.” She looks at it again and she can’t calculate the root of 3.14-something without a calculator or at least a piece of paper and ample time, but sure, that looks about right. Still – holy shit. She laughs, shaking her head. “Sorry, brah. He’s just never going to get this.”

Danny is resolute. “He will. Have a little faith.”

That’s a lot to put on a cake. Kono marvels at the numbers again. “Does pi even have a precise value?”

“Popular misconception. It does, you just can’t express it in a finite number of decimal digits. Not as long as you’re using an integer as the base.”

“Cool,” she says, and he rolls his eyes, but she means it. She’s never been a math whizz, but her coding knowledge gives her enough of a leg up to grasp the basics of what his explanation means, and it’s always useful to find out more about how deeply, irrevocably nerdy your teammates really are. Could be handy either during a case, as blackmail, or if she ever ends up on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with only a math question and a single helpline between her and cash money.

When Chin and Lou finally walk in with Steve between them, Steve spots the cake immediately. There’s a bounce to his step as he lopes the rest of the way over, and his play at surprise is gossamer thin when he asks, eyebrows raised, “Is that for me?”

Kono exchanges a look with Danny, who still appears utterly confident, chest out, shoulders straight. 

“Only if you can guess what it means,” she says.

Steve narrows his eyes at Danny. He doesn’t even bother trying to include the rest of Five-0 in his suspicious look, because evidently he knows by now who’s masterminding his birthdays every year. “Is this a carrot cake?”

“Yes,” Danny says, cool exterior cracking for a huge, proud grin. 

Just like that, Steve’s suspicion melts away and he beams back. “Root vegetable, square cake. It’s the square root of pie. That’s awesome, Danny.”

“Wouldn’t that be the square root of cake?” Chin asks, but Danny shushes him with good humor.

Kono watches them in amazement, because this seems to be going not terribly. “How did you get that? Boss, don’t tell me you know those numbers off the top of your head.”

Steve gestures at the cake grandly. “Sure, it looks familiar, but come on – it’s an obvious pun.”

“Oh, yeah,” she deadpans. “Obvious.”

Lou groans. “No, it’s a really dumb pun.”

“Maybe it’s too intellectual for you,” Steve retorts, good-natured and teasing and still grinning over a birthday cake. Kono’s not regretting a single penny of her contribution anymore, and makes a silent vow to trust Danny implicitly with whatever hare-brained scheme he comes up with next year. She also adds Steve to her mental list of math nerds who should be willing to do her favors.

Danny has magicked up a kitchen knife from somewhere, and he’s using it to gesture, but he’s smartly containing himself to directing those gestures at the cake. “Steve, you want a piece of this or not?”

“Duh,” Steve says, but he’s not looking at the food as he says it. 

Kono watches until he finally tears his eyes away from the side of Danny’s face, which is just when Danny looks up to hand Steve a paper plate with the square slice he cut. He adds a forceful, “Eat up. You need it.”

And that’s a wholly different thing, right there. She’ll concede she might have been wrong about Steve and pi, but she’d be willing to wager her favorite surfboard that neither Steve nor Danny would recognize the square root of catching a clue if it hit them in the face with a handful of buttercream frosting.

*

### 3\. Lou

They walk in, as they do most days, already fighting about something. “I’m just saying,” Steve says, which sounds pretty normal, until he continues with, “that if I were a woman in the early nineteen hundreds, that would be my primary concern. You need to pick someone who you know will be able and willing to provide for you and any children that may come from the marriage, and your parents too, when they get old.”

“And I’m saying that that’s just not a valid argument in our very contemporary-” Danny pauses here, coming to an abrupt stop in the middle of the office to wave his arms in a wide motion, like a blooming flower. He reminds Lou of a very angry ballerina in slacks, who then takes the last few steps to the tech table just to hit it with a flat hand. “And _very_ modern discussion.”

“You’re taking things out of their context,” Steve says, disgruntled, coming up at Danny’s side. “You’re changing the rules on me.”

“Changing? Steve, these books are still relevant today – _exempli gratia_, this conversation we’re currently having – so why shouldn’t we debate their merits with today’s modern societal values in mind, hm?”

“You could’ve just pointed out that Darcy has money, too, you know.” 

“Ten thousand a year.” Danny’s gloating now, for whatever reason. “That’s about double what yours has. That would’ve been too easy.”

Lou is sufficiently confused yet intrigued that he exchanges a look with Kono. They were having a pleasantly calm if teasing conversation about the merits of surfing versus golf until the sudden interruption, but seeing as he knows from experience that there’s no talking over Steve and Danny when they get going, he chooses the path of least resistance and just rolls with their craziness. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s this?” 

Kono jumps in before either of the guys can answer. “One of you has a time-travelling girlfriend.” When everyone stares at her, she shrugs, unconcerned. “Danny mentioned a Darcy. Jerry, Chin and Malia made me watch Doctor Who last night and that stuff really burrows into your brain.”

Both Danny and Steve stare at her for a little longer, as if willing that to make more sense, but Danny seems to get his words back first. “It’s _Mr._ Darcy.”

Kono grins, devilishly angelical in that way she has. “Okay. New boyfriend?”

Steve is lightly glaring at her now, something like hungry curiosity mixed in or badly hidden under the annoyance, but Lou decides not to spend too much time considering _that_. 

Danny either has the same thought, or he just doesn’t notice Steve’s odd expression. All he does is shake his head ruefully at Kono. “The American education system is once again shown to be sadly lacking – no offense. We’re debating the relative merits of Mr. Darcy versus Mr. Bingley. We’ve been reading Pride and Prejudice.”

Again, Lou is drawn in against his better judgement, as he so often is with these two. That could be considered the full story of how he came to work with them in the first place. “You – as in, both of you, in a cute little private book club? – have been reading Pride and Prejudice? Why?”

“Grace was doing Austen in school,” Steve says, like that’s all anyone could possibly need as an explanation.

Lou thinks about Samantha and Will and the suddenly scary fact that he has no clue what the hell they’re reading for school, if they’re reading anything at all. He knows they _know_ how to read, but that’s about it. “Lord, you guys are making me feel like a bad father.”

Danny snorts and takes a step away from the table to slap Lou on the back. “Nah, buddy, you’re the kind of great father who had his kids with the right woman and didn’t suffer through a messy divorce. I’m just trying to make damn sure I don’t lose touch.”

Steve swivels towards Danny like a dog who caught a whiff of pepperoni pizza. He also takes that step Danny took, like they’re attached with an invisible bungee rope and he’s being pulled back in, and when he speaks his voice is pitched lower, effectively excluding Lou and Kono from the conversation. It’d be rude as hell if Lou didn’t know by now that he’s not doing it on purpose. It’s one of those Steve-and-Danny things they can’t seem to help because they live in their own shared universe. 

“That’s never going to happen, Danny,” Steve says, the certainty behind it so rock-solid that it reassures even Lou on this thing he wasn’t worried about in the first place. “She loves you.”

“I know she does, you doofus.” Danny taps Steve’s shoulder with a fist, which seems to make Steve uncoil. “She’ll love me even more when she knows I have the good sense to go for Darcy.”

“Hey,” Steve whines. “This is Bingley slander.”

“So we got a Bingley and a Darcy,” Lou surmises.

Kono nods. “I actually remember them.” She gives Danny a pointed look. “I read Pride and Prejudice once. Watched the Keira Knightley movie, too.” 

Danny sticks his tongue out at her and Lou purposely doesn’t look in Steve’s direction to see what he makes of that.

“Sure, okay. So which dude is winning?” Unbidden, Lou has a flashback to 2012, the height of Samantha’s Twilight craze, when he had to physically step between her and her best friend at the time because one of them was team Edward and the other team Jacob. He makes an immediate, resolute decision to let Steve and Danny figure shit out on their own if they start pulling each other’s hair. There’s no way he’s getting in the middle of a white bromance sandwich.

“Darcy,” Danny proclaims, at the same microsecond that Steve says, “Bingley.” Steve shoots a brief glare at Danny and continues, waving a hand through the air as he talks like that’s not Danny’s signature move he’s co-opting. “Bingley is sweet. All he wants to do right from the start is make Jane Bennet happy.”

Danny is already shaking his head something fierce. “You don’t want a life partner who’s sweet all the time. You want someone you can fight with, someone you can talk to. You know, spar a little, mentally.”

“Oh yes,” Kono says, innocently butting in again, “I can see how that would be very important to you in an epic romance, Danny.”

Steve crosses his arms over his chest in a way that promises explosions in the near future. Lou just hopes to God they’re the metaphorical kind for once. “Well, if you want someone rich that you can fight with, you should marry Mr. Rochester. The guy hid a secret wife in his attic while he was romancing the main character, so there’s a lot to yell about even for you.”

Danny opens and closes his mouth, like he’s lost his voice out of shock or indignation or possibly just plain arousal. Lou hates himself a little for putting that last thought in his own head, but it’s hard to avoid. Life in Hawaii really changes a person – he never spent any time contemplating the wisdom of gay workplace romances in Chicago.

“That’s Jane Eyre,” Danny says, when he’s capable of sound again. “That’s a completely different book, and it was written by one of the Brontë sisters, not Austen.”

Steve sticks his nose in the air, superior. “According to the internet, it’s often mentioned in the same breath. I think it’s fair to draw comparisons.”

“We haven’t gotten there yet,” Danny insists. “That’s for next week.”

“I was bored last Sunday and found a free PDF online.”

Danny’s hand shoots out to give Steve’s shoulder a push. Steve barely moves, so Danny does it again, harder. “You cheater. You cheat.”

“Hey!” Steve unfolds his arms to grab the edge of the tech table to steady himself at the third push, which makes Danny stop. “How is reading ahead cheating? I’m just making sure I’m prepared.”

“Prepared!” Danny repeats, like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “Prepared, he says, completely skipping past all the effort I put into the slides I was going to use to introduce the book to him.” 

“You made a slideshow?” Lou asks incredulously, but he goes even more bitterly ignored than Danny’s possible Power Point presentation. He mostly tunes Steve and Danny out after that – Danny makes an argument for Steve having to reread the book in print, because a screen doesn’t offer the same experience as paper, and Steve scoffs and calls Danny a technophobe and asks who’s clinging to outdated values now.

It all lasts until Chin comes in, looking serene and carrying not only coffee for himself, but also four more in a cardboard tray. The promise of caffeine distracts even Steve and Danny sufficiently to make them quit their bickering for a minute, after which Danny announces he doesn’t know what anyone else’s plans this morning are, but he’s going to do some actual work, and Steve follows him into his office where they can be seen either resuming their argument or starting a brand new one. So much for that.

Lou, Chin and Kono all watch Steve and Danny’s mouths flap and arms wave for a while as the smell of coffee pervades the office. It’s as peaceful as it ever gets.

“You both look tired,” Chin says eventually, with a kind smile that Lou suspects passes for a cackle with him. “How bad was it this time?”

Lou’s not very willing to get back into it after narrowly escaping. He shakes his head. “That’s the most passionate book club I’ve ever seen.”

“Also the one with the most UST,” Kono adds.

That’s an acronym that means very little to Lou, but going off of Kono’s grin, he has a hunch that he’s not going to want to Google it, either.

*

### 4\. Eric

Universities are a hotbed of criminal activity and all economics professors are complete freaks. That’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn, Eric thinks, if two of them get murdered at two different universities in Honolulu in the span of two years, without any indication that their cases are connected.

The nice thing is that Five-0 has a protocol for this by now. The less nice thing is that, apparently, all institutes of higher learning have the same crappy seats in lecture halls, because undercover work is one thing, but keeping your ass in a hard plastic chair for two hours is a wholly different ‘nother thing, which Eric struggles with way more. Of course, there are circumstances that mitigate Eric’s suffering somewhat – circumstances like, for example, the pretty redhead sitting to his left.

He gives it fifteen minutes, just out of respect to Uncle D and his bespectacled teaching efforts, but then he lets his pen roll off the tiny desk, totally super duper by accident. It drops to the floor and rolls to right under the redhead’s seat, like the best wingman Eric’s ever had. She notices and bends over to pick it up, and hey, Eric is a gentleman these days, so he doesn’t look at her cleavage, even though it’s _right there_.

He does, however, tip his snapback at her when he accepts the pen back. Again, gentleman. “Thanks,” he whispers. “I’m Eric.”

“Ashley,” she says, and she gives him a smirk and a look that lingers just a little bit, but that’s it, for another few minutes. 

He plays with his pen, doodles some little dogs saying swear words in the margins of his notes, and pretends to pay attention. It’s not so bad, really. 

Then his ruse pays off, and she leans in towards him slightly. He automatically does the same. “I never, ever thought Macroeconomics 101 would be my favorite class,” she whispers at him, almost conspiratorially. 

He gives her his most charming I-am-definitely-not-21-Jump-Streeting-you-right-now smile back. He’s older and wiser than last time, so it’s gotten a little harder to fake being young and dumb, but she seems to buy it. “That guy’s a really good teacher, isn’t he?” he whispers back, feeling a surge of familial pride. Way to go, Uncle D.

“Oh, for sure,” she says. She lifts a beautifully sculpted eyebrow. “But like, is it hot in here, or is it professor Jeffries?”

Oh, shit. Not again. He wants to stick his fingers in his ears, but he can’t, because that’d be suspicious. Think quick, Eric!

“Right,” he says, brightly. A little too brightly, perhaps. Overcompensation has always been a weak spot of his. He tries to dampen it by lowering the pitch of his voice. “Sure.”

Ashley gives him a confused smile, but doesn’t point at him and yell “IMPOSTER!”, so that’s good. She sighs and rests her chin in her hand, elbow on the corner of Eric’s desk. “Don’t you just want to eat him up?”

“Eh,” he says, as non-committally as he can. If he gives the impassioned denial that he wants to give her, he’s going to have to explain what’s fueling that, which will be hard to do without either admitting he’s related to Uncle D or coming across as an epic douchebag. He’s open-minded, okay, and so is his undercover persona, and he’s sticking with that.

She makes a tssk-ing sound, like his less than enthusiastic reply is just silly. She pokes him in the arm with a glittery fingernail and points at the door. “Well, that guy’s sure seeing something he likes.”

Lurking by the wall, next to the double doors leading to the auditorium, is McGarrett. He’s leaning back, arms crossed, which would look relaxed and almost bored if his eyes weren’t following every single move Uncle D makes with an intensity that borders on creepy. He’s rapt, captivated and whatever another synonym for those two is, and Eric kind of wants to look away because, wow, it keeps getting worse and he did _not_ sign up for this. Watching parental figures in his life eyefuck each other? Yeah, no thanks.

Except Uncle D doesn’t even seem to realize McGarrett is here. He’s way too good as a teacher to be watching the door instead of his students, so instead he’s moving around in front of the board and shoving his dorky glasses back up his nose and tapping words he wrote and talking non-stop and hey, making the class laugh? Apparently he just said something genuinely funny. Good going, Uncle D.

Eric’s a little late joining in on the laughter, and like a real teacher – one of those good ones, the ones that pay attention and don’t let you get away with shit but you don’t even mind because they’re actually really cool and you _want_ to show them that you learned stuff – he zeroes in on Eric. The next moment, Eric’s being pointed at by his fake professor. 

“Mr. Russo!” Uncle D says, which is trippy. Only Eric’s superior acting skills keep him from giggling. “Can you tell me which part of the neoclassical synthesis is Keynesian in thought?”

“Sure,” Eric says, and then glances down at his notes and finds, to his own surprise, the answer. It’s right there, in his own hand. “Macroeconomics.”

Uncle D nods. “Very good. Now let’s move on to-”

Eric tunes him out again, marveling at the little glow of satisfaction he feels. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Ashley do something close to a smirk in his direction, so he shakes his head at her in disbelief and whispers, “I wasn’t even paying attention. How is he still teaching me stuff?”

Her smile turns more genuine. “I guess he’s magical in more than one way.” She leans in close, which is nice for a second as he catches a hint of something floral-scented – perfume or deo, maybe even lipgloss – but then she ruins it by adding words. “Bet he’s magical in bed, too.”

And yeah, that really cuts into Eric’s harmonious sense of academic achievement. It’s time for drastic measures, so he points at McGarrett surreptitiously. “Remember that guy over there? I happen to know that’s the professor’s ex-Navy boyfriend. Yeah. Very possessive, wouldn’t lust after Jeffries too much if I were you.”

For all of a minute, the scandal of it is a pretty good distraction from the leering Ashley’s been doing. Then Eric’s brilliant plan takes a turn and comes back to bite him in the ass, because she starts speculating about Uncle D and McGarrett’s sex life in hushed tones.

*

When the case is finally, blessedly over and done with, all that’s left is a lot of paperwork to be filled out. Most of it isn’t Eric’s, but his presence has been requested for a debrief. (He’s been trying and miserably failing not to think about whether McGarrett and Uncle D debrief each other on the reg. Damn you, Ashley.) So in the morning, he rolls up to Iolani Palace with the feeling of a job well done, ready to give his side of the story and receive some pats on the back for his ingenuity and genuine Bond-like, chameleon-esque undercover work.

He’s strolling from the elevator to the door that will get him to that fancy tech table room, when he hears voices drift through the mostly glass walls. Lou Grover is standing on the other side, shaking his head at McGarrett and Uncle D, and if Eric strains his ears, he can just make out the words.

“I’m just saying, how the hell do you still manage to get mistaken for a couple even while maintaining a careful distance of at least thirty feet from each other in public?” 

Aaand Eric executes a U-turn.

While he’s skittering back to the elevator, he carefully re-examines his schedule for the day and decides that actually, this debrief can wait. Nobody seems to have spotted him yet, so maybe he should get himself a coffee first, just so he’s wide awake and primed to answer any questions to the best of his abilities. It’s pure professionalism, really. Yes, it’s of paramount importance, and such ─ coffee.

From Starbucks. The one on the other side of the island.

*

### 5\. Jerry

The team comes back to the office faintly dust-covered. Jerry leaves the tech table to greet them and burns with jealousy for a little bit, because he’d like to get his hands dirty out in the field too, where the really heroic work happens. Then he spots Kono’s bandaged shoulder, and his emotions flip and he experiences a sudden wave of gratitude for the distance he usually has from bullets, explosives and pointy things. “Are you okay?”

Kono smiles at him. “Yeah, Jer, I’m fine. Just a scratch.”

Chin watches her more closely than usual, like he’s keeping an eye out to be sure she’s telling the truth, but Lou nods in the direction of Steve and Danny, who didn’t make it more than two steps from the office doors. “It’s them you should be worried about.”

Jerry’s heart jumps into his throat briefly and he wants to ask why. They both look outwardly fine, but you never know what kind of scary stuff could be going on inside a human body. He’s bracing himself for whatever the doctor’s horrible verdict might be, when Kono nudges his elbow and gives it to him without asking. “They’re fine too, just fighting again.” 

Jerry starts paying actual attention just in time to see Steve open his mouth and not get very far. Danny shushes him aggressively, with both sound and a hand gesture forceful enough that it could have taken an eye out. “No! Did I say you got to talk yet?” 

“I was never in any danger, Danny,” Steve says. He’s not very good with rules. It’s one of those things that make him so Captain America-y, but as Jerry has gotten to know the team better, he’s also started to develop an understanding for Danny’s staunchly negative position on the risks Steve takes. Stuff like hearing Steve fart and then blusteringly pretend it was Eddie has definitely served to confirm Steve is just as human as the rest of them, and could therefore just as easily get hurt or worse. “That guy was never going to set off the grenade,” Steve insists, and Jerry still doesn’t know exactly what happened, but he can guesstimate a mental image of the situation. “It would’ve killed him too.”

“Are you actively trying to get me to call our therapist to rat you out?” Danny asks, volume rising to a yell. “Do you _want_ me to have to tell her that you’re engaging in self-destructive behavior that’s going to put me in an early grave?”

“Why the hell are you in a grave if I’m the one who self-destructs?”

Danny’s face is flushed in anger now, which is a bad sign. “I’m your partner! What do you think happens to me if you die?”

Steve looks kind of touched, but he seems to have just enough of a sense of preservation to school his expression when in response Danny seems about two seconds away from having very real steam come out of his ears. Steve holds up his hands in a placating gesture, and that’s kind of a relief. Spontaneous human combustion – Jerry’s always been fascinated by it, but he doesn’t particularly want to see it happen right in front of his face to one of his friends.

It’s this thought that propels him forward. “Hey, guys,” he says, and suddenly all eyes are on him. “Did I ever tell you about this friend of mine who’s a professional pastry chef?” 

“You did not,” Steve says, into the stunned silence.

“Well, this morning he called me to let me know an order for these really great tarts he makes had fallen through and I could get them from him for super cheap and I thought that’d be nice for an afternoon snack for us all, and I was going to keep it a surprise, but uh- I kind of need a hand getting them up here from my office. I had to make three trips to get them from my car.”

The stunned quality of the silence doesn’t disappear.

“How many tarts did you _buy_?” Danny asks.

Jerry tries not to look shifty, and definitely, definitely not look like he’s planning to put it under work expenses now that he’ll have to share. “A few.”

“Well,” Chin says, kindly, “I’m sure Steve and Danny would be more than happy to help you out, Jer.”

Steve raises his eyebrows as well as a hand. He makes a circling motion to indicate Danny and himself. “I’m sorry, are we being volunteered for physical labor? Is that what’s happening here?”

“I hate all of you.” With those words and a dry look, Danny turns around and heads out of the door and back for the elevator, followed closely by an eye-rolling Steve. He doesn’t appear to be rolling his eyes directly at Danny, though – Chin’s unsubtle push after Jerry’s setup has given them a common target for their annoyance, which is a more fortuitous result than Jerry had dared hope for.

“Well done, man,” Lou stage-whispers, while Kono shoots him a relieved thumbs up. 

Jerry feels useful and pretty clever, which is always nice, but it’s just a little nicer when it’s a feeling that comes from people he respects this much. He shoots them all a smile and a thumbs up back and then hurries after Steve and Danny, because he can’t really trust them to hold the elevator for him right now and it’s a _lot_ of stairs to get to the basement. 

“Well, maybe we should buy a boat,” Steve is saying, when Jerry steps into the elevator just before the doors slide shut. Steve and Danny both make room for him by moving to one side each, leaving an open space in the middle. Jerry takes it and is not surprised when Danny leans forward to talk past him without further acknowledgement.

“Boats are not relaxing,” Danny says. He doesn’t ask why Steve is bringing up boats in the first place, so Jerry is probably the only person in the dark there. “Need I remind you of a certain fishing trip where we ended up in a sinking dinghy with you towing it like a seahorse?”

Steve makes a noise of surprised approval. “Hey, you said dinghy, not boat.”

“I know stuff.”

“Yes, you do,” Steve agrees easily. “Anyway, if we had a boat we could go sailing. Fishing. Take Nahele, Grace and Charlie out.”

Danny copies Steve’s way of casually listing things, ticking them off on his fingers. “Die horrible drowning deaths. Get eaten by sharks. Kill you and _feed_ the body to the sharks so they’ll leave me alone.”

Steve snorts. “If you kill me because we’re stranded without food, you’d be better off eating me yourself.”

“Ey!” Danny complains, just when the elevator dings to let them know they’ve arrived in the basement. “How did this conversation turn to cannibalism, huh? This is not a normal topic.”

Finally, Jerry feels like he has something to contribute. “Did you guys ever hear of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571?” Steve and Danny step out of the elevator together and he trails them, following in the middle behind. 

Steve nods. “The Andes flight disaster. They were stranded in snowy mountains with nothing to eat but the people that had already died.”

“Yeah, I read the book,” Danny says, scowling. “Did not enjoy it. All seemed too much like something that could actually happen to me, cavorting as I am with Steve.”

“This is dark stuff,” Jerry says, equal parts fascinated and horrified.

They’ve reached Jerry’s open office door, but instead of going in, Danny half turns to wave an open hand at him accusingly. “You were the one who brought it up! Remember that, five seconds ago?”

“Speaking of dark stuff,” Steve says, which thankfully draws Danny’s attention elsewhere. “Why does it smell like cyanide in here?”

Jerry squeezes past them into his office, so that Danny’s voices comes from behind him when Danny says, “Almonds, Steve. It smells like almonds.”

“Almonds contain cyanide.”

“They do not.”

Steve and Danny seem to be too wrapped up in conversation to realize that the three cake boxes Jerry puts on his desk could easily remain stacked and be carried by him alone, or that that’s how he moved them from the corner to the desk in the first place, all at once. It’s also how he moved them inside, this morning – the tarts are real, but the three trips bit was a complete fabrication.

“Haven’t you ever read Agatha Christie?” he asks Danny, to further camouflage his little white lie. At least those are books that are generally somewhat less traumatizing. He opens the box on top, too, in hopes that everyone will be dazzled by the food. Working with Five-0 has definitely taught him a thing or two about strategy.

Both Steve and Danny crowd a little closer to get a good look at the tartlets. Ha! Victory is sweet and smells like baked goods with almond filling.

“I’m not much for murder mysteries,” Danny quips, still on Jerry’s previous comment, and this, right here, is why Jerry once told him he was the reason Jerry didn’t get outside much. He can never tell if Danny is being serious, sarcastic, or somehow both. It’s fun when it happens to other people, but directly confronted with it like this it just makes him nervous.

Steve McGarrett never seems to have had that problem, but then again Jerry imagines there are a lot of problems he’s had in life that Steve doesn’t necessarily recognize. “Almonds really do contain cyanide, though,” Steve says. “You only need to ingest about twenty for a lethal dose.”

“Oh, please,” Danny scoffs. “That’s an urban legend.”

Steve is already shaking his head and crossing his arms, like he’s settling in for one of those classic Williams-McGarrett battles of wit right here in Jerry’s basement. “It’s not. Almonds don’t want to be eaten by predators.”

Danny rolls his eyes so expressively he moves his head along with it. “Never thought I’d have so much in common with a seed.”

“Funny,” Steve shoots back drily, “but you’re missing most of the cool features almonds have. You haven’t evolved to turn the common amino acid phenylalanine through a series of chemical reactions into mandelonitrile, have you? Do you know how to get enzymes to break that down into benzaldehyde and cyanide if someone bites into you?” Steve pokes a finger at the center of Danny’s chest. “I bet you don’t.”

Danny bats Steve’s finger away. “Speak for yourself. You have no idea what happens when someone bites me.”

“That sounds like a challenge.”

“I’d like to see you try, buddy.”

And ah, there’s another Williams-McGarrett classic: a distinct sense of underlying homoerotic tension. It’s bad this time. Bad enough that Jerry blurts, as a necessary distraction for himself rather than Steve or Danny, “How many people have you killed by serving them almond tarts?”

“That’s classified,” Steve says, with Danny lip syncing the words with an eerie accuracy and a flair for dramatics. Steve grins at Danny before he continues, “But also, none.” He nods at the open box. “Sweet, domesticated almonds were used for those. You need the bitter wild ones for murder, which are legally not allowed for sale in the US.”

“Aha!” Danny crows. “So I was right. It’s an urban legend.”

“But the science is kind of cool,” Steve insists.

Jerry fully expects Danny to say no, because that’s what he’s been doing the entire time. Instead, Danny tilts his head a little and almost smiles and says, “Yeah, okay, the science is kind of cool, you nerd.”

Steve beams, and that’s when Jerry can feel the certainty of it sink into his brain: one of these days, his resolve to stay far away from the Five-0 RPF shipping boards is going to break. It will be a fateful day, but it won’t be this one. It won’t even be his fault when it happens, because usually he’s an ethical conspiracy theorist who tries to steer clear of anything involving people he knows in real life. 

Or, you know, when it’s about their personal lives, anyway. He’s still not sure those theories about Steve Rogers’ super serum and tests on modern Navy SEALs are entirely unfounded.

*

### +1. Danny

Danny Williams is not a man who will grit his teeth and bear a punishment. It’s not that he can’t. It’s that he won’t, because he doesn’t see the point in suffering stoically. (He remembers his time in Colombia; he’s been there, done that, and he still has a scar on his temple to prove it.) What follows logically is that he sees that point even less when every time he turns, there’s a Steve McGarrett at his side, who is the perfect person to bitch at or about or with, and is also big enough to obscure any point pretty effectively. A mere point is nothing in the face of Steve’s sculpted shoulders and hulking, inked biceps.

All that is to say that if there is something in Danny’s general vicinity that he doesn’t like, the world – and Steve, but he’s a huge, tattooed part of that – will hear about it. Which is, presumably, why Danny’s prolonged silence is now causing Steve’s grin to grow exponentially. “Oh, shut up,” Danny tells him, because this is an entirely different type of suffering in silence, but the same basic principle of needing to throw words at it still applies.

Across the table Steve lifts his hands in surrender very goofily. He hasn’t taken a single bite of his own generous helping of spaghetti Bolognese, which is almost rude after he laid claim to Danny’s kitchen for three hours to prepare it. “I didn’t say anything.”

Danny waves his fork at Steve’s nose, but redirects to his plate in a conciliatory effort to avoid discussions on the eloquent nature of Steve’s faces. Good topic, but they’ve been over that twice already this week. “What, is it poisoned? Eat, or I’m going to get suspicious.”

“Nothing suspicious about it. I was just enjoying watching you realize I’m a good cook.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say _good_,” Danny hedges, even though to anyone except Steve he would, he so totally would. If Steve consistently cooks like this these days, Danny wouldn’t even mind letting him roam free in his kitchen more often, which is so high an honor he can’t say it out loud if he doesn’t want Steve to gloat for the entire next month. “Decent, perhaps.”

Steve does a hand flourish and nod combo, like he probably would have actually bowed if he’d been standing up. “Thank you. I had a decent teacher.”

“Ha ha,” Danny says drily, even though it’s good to know those afternoons together were well spent. He wasn’t always sure Steve was really listening to him when he was trying to impress the importance of fresh lemons or generously salting your cooking water. 

“Only the finest for you, Danno.” It’s a taunt, that’s very obvious, but not a mean one. Steve is smiling when he finally picks up his spoon and digs in.

Danny is kind of moved, knowing Steve took something from what Danny showed him and is now going to such lengths to prove it. He watches Steve eat a few bites before he realizes he should probably reply. “I bet you say that to all your dates.”

Steve startles, or at least convincingly pretends to. Why the joking suggestion they’re dating would still startle him, about a dozen insinuations that they’re already married in, is something of a mystery. “This is not a date, though.” 

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Danny tells him. “Ever heard of sarcasm?”

“That’s Lieutenant Commander Obvious to you.”

“Congratulations, you just got promoted.”

Steve flashes a quick smile, but it’s distracted. Danny refrains from rolling his eyes and turns back to his own pasta instead, opting to let Steve stew for a while in whatever thought got stuck in his head. These days, more often than not he’ll come out with it on his own eventually.

It doesn’t take too long. Neither of their plates is even half empty yet. “You ever think it’s weird how people keep thinking we’re a couple?”

Danny has done a lot of introspective work on this subject – mostly along the lines of staring deeply in the mirror and wondering where that _madly in love with an idiot_ label that everyone seems to spot on his forehead is hidden – so he’s able to shrug with complete confidence. “Not really.”

Steve nods, like that makes sense. “I don’t, either.” 

Danny is about to point out that that’s obviously bullshit, because why else would Steve have brought it up, when Steve explains why.

“Do you think that _that’s_ weird, maybe?”

This is an angle Danny has to admit he hasn’t considered yet, mostly because it’s around multiple corners and therefore not very likely to yield anything. Then again, he shouldn’t be surprised. Steve often does his best thinking not just outside the box, but huddled three boxes away from the one they want, cradling explosives he made out of gum and shoestrings. “It’s not weird unless we make it weird,” Danny decides, because that’s true for most things in life.

Steve really looks at him, so Danny does the same, and somehow he knows exactly what Steve is going to say before he says it, eyes frighteningly intent. “So let’s make it weird.”

“You’re unhinged,” Danny tells him, but in a way that he knows Steve will interpret as “I’m listening”.

“I’m serious,” Steve insists, picking up on the cue. “I’m more comfortable with people thinking I’m dating you than I ever was with them thinking I was dating Catherine.”

“You were _actually_ dating Catherine.”

“Exactly.” Steve makes a swooping hand gesture that Danny recognizes as something he unwittingly introduced into Steve’s body language. “Isn’t that weird?”

“Pretty much.” Danny doesn’t have to scour his memory to add a story of his own, because there’s a whole pile of them that he swept under the rug, just waiting to be dug into. “When we broke up, Melissa told me she hoped I’d find someone new and that I’d be very happy with them.”

Steve looks dismayed. “That’s not weird. It’s sweet.”

Danny fiddles with his fork. “She was doing that pronoun thing. The one where someone’s avoiding gender so obviously they might as well just point and yell ‘gay!’” He points the fork at himself and then realizes that he may have just come out on accident. It’s not like it was ever a huge secret, but it’s not something he was planning on bringing up unforced around his Navy Reserves BFF unless it ever became relevant.

Then again, perhaps it just did.

“Ah,” Steve says.

And then he doesn’t say anything else, so Danny is already a little pissed when he’s forced to look up. 

It goes up in smoke as soon as he gets a glance at Steve watching him. Steve doesn’t look smug or confused or awkward or even sympathetic. Mostly, he looks a tiny bit sad and a touch more curious. “That thing,” he says.

“You know it?” Danny has to ask the question despite knowing pretty sure that the answer is yes, because they’ve never talked about this. He’s not going to let an opportunity to coax Steve into saying meaningful words pass him by. Meaningful to whom is still up for debate, but the answer might not matter all that much – could be him, could be Steve, but either way it’s both. If it matters to one of them, the answer is always going to be both.

Great, now Steve’s got Danny’s brain doing the whole around the corner box huddling gum explosives thing.

“Yeah.” Steve shrugs. “Mary did it to me once during my first year back here.”

A lightbulb flickers on, which is something nobody should need during the day in Hawaii, but Danny allows himself the extravagance. “Would that have been just after she met me, perchance?”

“Got it in one.”

“Surf buddies,” Danny mumbles, because he always suspected there was a little more behind that.

Steve nods like those are wise words.

“I had a conversation with Grace once, also during that first year, where she kept mentioning how cool her friend’s lesbian parents were while throwing me meaningful looks and asking if you were coming over later. I’m pretty sure that was her way of giving us her blessing.”

“We have Gracie’s blessing?” Steve sounds choked up at that, which just goes to show that he’s a very smart man, sometimes. He’s got his priorities straight, if, hopefully, not much else.

“Guess so,” Danny says, feeling a little tight in the throat himself all of a sudden.

“Well then.” Steve puts down his spoon, but so deliberately that what follows will have to be pretty grand to do justice to the build-up it’s getting. 

Danny holds his breath.

“You wanna?” Steve asks.

Talk about an anticlimax. Danny is dismayed and disgusted and other things starting with dis-, and also more sure than ever that he’s completely, utterly, hopelessly gone on this man. 

Still. There’s no way he can let this go. “Do I _wanna_? That’s how you’re choosing to go about this? This, this huge, monumental step in our relationship, and you ask me if I _wanna_, you genius?”

Steve’s eyebrows do a little dance up and down. He looks entirely too sure of himself for someone getting yelled at after propositioning his best friend. “Yeah,” he says, and that’s totally a smirk, lurking there at the corner of his mouth. “Because see, Daniel, I figure you’re a pretty sure thing.”

“I should walk away right now, Steven, just for that.”

“But you won’t.”

“I won’t,” Danny admits, because there’s only so much resistance even he can put up before he needs to pause to make sure Steve knows that whatever nonsense Danny may be spinning, this thing is fully reciprocated and consensual. They stare at each other across the table for a long, fraught moment. “Okay, so let’s, hypothetically, say that you’re not completely wrong.”

“I rarely am.”

“I marvel daily at how your head fits through any door with an ego that size attached to it.”

Steve’s eyebrows quirk up in delight and he opens his mouth. Danny almost throws a fork at him.

“Don’t! I don’t want to hear a peep from you about other things of yours of considerable size.”

“Wow, Danny, you have a dirty mind.” Steve grins. It’s sinful, really. “I was just going to say that maybe we should take it slow. This is a pretty big thing.”

“Yeah, that’s good. Smart.” He totally means that, but then he looks at Steve just a little too long, and Steve looks back with something just a little too close to adoration, and the knowledge that they’ve been doing this for years and years hits Danny hard. Something hot and melty happens in his stomach, like coming in from the cold with chilled cheeks and numb fingers, being handed a glass of really good punch that’s definitely been spiked pretty liberally, and feeling the slow warmth of it slide down your throat and seep into your palms, inevitably intoxicating. “Hey, uh,” he says. “Hey, wanna be dumb for a bit, first?”

“Yeah,” Steve breathes, and if Danny thought his grin should’ve been illegal earlier, God, he clearly didn’t know what he was talking about yet.

The warmth dips down from his stomach, spiking lower, diffuse through his entire body. He might have found the secret to infinitely renewable energy. “Yeah?”

In reply, Steve doesn’t get up so much as he dives headfirst across the table to join their mouths together, probably getting tomato sauce from the food he worked so hard on all over his nice shirt mid-bellyflop. That’s definitely _epically_ stupid, so Danny takes it as a yes.

*

### +2. Steve

Steve has always known Danny is good-looking. It shouldn’t be news, but it’s a gut-punch anyway when he watches Danny fall back on the bed, naked from the waist up, with his hairdo falling apart in ways that make him look more wanton than his lack of shirt or obvious arousal, and laughing breathlessly because they haven’t been able to stop while wrestling with buttons.

Steve pauses next to the bed a second too long, because Danny pushes up on his elbows and says, “What?”

Danny might give Steve a lot of shit for almost all his plans, but Steve is an experienced Navy SEAL and he’s been selected and trained for quick and accurate decision making skills. So he grins, and gets on the bed on his knees, and takes great delight in kissing his way up Danny’s body. By the time they’re nose to nose, Danny is laughing again, not in the least because Steve made the wonderful discovery of a ticklish spot just under Danny’s ribs on the way up. “Hi,” he tells Danny, feeling moronic and brilliant all at the same time and totally okay with that.

“Hi,” Danny echoes, his eyes warm. He brushes a hand over Steve’s temple, smoothing back his hair. “What’s going on in that brain?”

There are so many answers Steve could give to that. Most of them are just shy of embarrassing and better fitted to another time, so he chooses something simple and immediately relevant. “You wouldn’t happen to have Professor Jeffries’ glasses at hand, would you?”

Danny stills and looks at him consideringly for a long moment, like he’s an assignment about to be graded. “I might,” he says, and there’s no smile on his face, but he can’t keep it from lingering in his voice. “Can you talk science to me?”

Steve doesn’t think he’ll be capable of much higher brain function if they keep going the way they were headed, but he’s nothing if not adventurous, stubborn and willing to try. “I can recite the periodic table.” He could also instruct Danny on how to build a Molotov cocktail step by step, but somehow, seeing as he is in Danny Williams’ bed, he thinks explosives might not be the way to go if he wants his partner to get the right kind of hot and bothered. 

“That’ll do.” Danny pushes at Steve to let him move, stretches out to reach the nightstand and gropes around in the first drawer for a bit. He easily produces both the glasses and some lube, which he drops on the bed next to them.

Steve’s imagination offers up a whole bunch of gleeful hypotheses based just on that, and he feels a stirring in more than one place when the realization hits him that he’ll get to test those theories one by one, thoroughly, replicating experiments for a better dataset whenever the hell he feels like it. “The scientific method is a credit to humanity.”

“Hmm,” Danny says, vaguely affirmative, and then hooks an ankle around Steve’s leg and does something clever to flip them, so that he ends up on top. Steve’s heart flips, too, when Danny grins and adds, “So let’s collect some empirical evidence.”

*

Preliminary results are overwhelmingly, mind-blowingly positive, but it is the unanimous opinion of the researchers that further testing is a matter of such great urgency that it should not be delayed. A _lot_ of further testing. The research may indeed take years, or perhaps even a lifetime. 

**Author's Note:**

> A few more notes:
> 
> 1) There are actual free (and legal) PDFs and ePubs of Austen and Brontë books available out there, if you’re interested! A tiny bit of Googling is all it would cost you. The movie Kono mentions is _Pride and Prejudice_ (2005), directed by Joe Wright.
> 
> 2) [Here is the Wikipedia page for the Andes plane crash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571), which was a horrific real event in 1972 in which a plane chartered by a Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the mountains. The book Danny mentions is _Alive_ by Piers Paul, a non-fiction account of the events based on interviews with the survivors and their families.
> 
> 3) Agatha Christie was a British writer of detective novels, best known for characters like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
> 
> 4) Eddie (Steve’s canonical dog) gets name-dropped in this, and I know he only shows his adorable face after Chin and Kono have already left, but let’s call that authorial freedom. If we don’t use it for dogs, what are we doing with our lives, really? 🐶
> 
> *
> 
> With that out of the way, thank you for reading! Research has shown that comments are really awesome. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com). Also consider visiting msbeeinmybonnet on [ao3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeinmybonnet/) or [Tumblr](https://msbeeinmybonnet.tumblr.com/)!


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